Measurement of plant leaf area using image processing techniques

It is difficult to measure the leaf area of plants by conventional methods as a result of the irregular leaf shapes. In this research, a new method was presented to measure leaf area using image processing techniques. The leaves images were acquired by MS3100 3CCD camera, and each image was composed of three channel data (green, red, near-infrared). The image data were transferred to a host computer and were stored as files in TIFF or JPEG format. Some image processing methods were applied to calibrate the leaf image, detect the margin of the leaf, and calculate the area by counting the pixels in the leaf. From the experimental results, it shows that the image method has good measurement accuracy; the relative error is less than 0.5 percent; and image processing is a rapid and non-destructive tool to measure the leaf area of plants.